Raise Your Mugs...

….And Celebrate a New Semester! (Including Random Thoughts on Time)

So here I am. Summer is over and school has begun. It’s funny how time looks so short in hindsight. And so long when we view the expanse ahead. The experience is not unlike looking into a telescope backwards. We glance back and deplete our memories of the dull times, those events that matter least to our perspective of the past. Gone are the drives back from our friend’s house at midnight or later. Gone are the bland hours spent dosing through our hourly wage. Gone are the hours when we slept. When we ate lunch that hot and hazy Wednesday afternoon. When we cut the grass. When we killed minutes watching that rerun of fucking Seinfeld.

No. No. Go back. Go back to the day when we got back from school. When we got back from work. When we got back from anything for that matter. When the whole summer, the whole day lay before us. There’s a feeling that overwhelms our brain. That exquisite emotion of forever, where we have forever to do whatever we like.

Have you ever daydreamed when you were young? Perhaps when you were in 7th grade, and it was May, the harbinger of summer and you were deaf to Mr. Finley’s lesson on photosynthesis instead perceiving a time when you are fifty years old. How faraway it seemed, only a hair short of impossible. A hair, a gray hair. Mr. Finley’s gray hair glistens in the sunlight. And though he stands in front of you, as a physical presence, as an undeniable testament to middle age. The absolutely ancient, wrinkled idea he proves means nothing. Yes. Yes you convince yourself. I have forever until then. I have high school, college, friendships, relationships, marriages, kids, jobs all that shit before then….

And now you’re fifty. You have two kids, one planned entering college and one mistake just entering 7th grade. Holy fuck where’d the time go?

Are you sure you want the answer? Fine I’ll tell you. It went nowhere. In fact it never existed. Time is not some goal to be reached. Not some ticking time bomb to be defused. Not some second after second measurement to be perceived any differently in the past or the future. It’s a constant that’s so constant it doesn’t exist. It’s a constant that our simple minds could only name but never control.

And back to the issue at hand. So here I am, back at school mourning a summer long gone. In fact the previous minutes I took to write this are long gone. An interminably long semester expands before me. But you know what? When I’m fifty it’ll look short as hell.